You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - How to Keep From Getting Overwhelmed - #12

Episode Date: February 11, 2018

Get the information you need, but make sure it's the correct info. Then you'll be educated, not overwhelmed. We're here to help you along the way. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Manus. Welcome to the You'll Hear It podcast. Today, we're going to tell you how to keep from getting overwhelmed with too much jazz information. What do you think, Adam? Too much jazz information? Is that possible? Is that legal?

I take on so much jazz information every day. Oh. Well, maybe the key is to making sure that we are taking on the right jazz information, you know, and then we don't have to worry as much about getting overwhelmed with too much. There's never too much of a good thing. thing, but I think that there is the pacing of it and there is the right thing. We're living in an age now where there's just an overload of all kinds of information, so I think we need to regulate that.

We need to, and we can with self-discipline, you know, control how much information we have coming in. The tricky part is, with jazz, is there's so much great music. There's so many great recordings. There's so many great things going on now, live and being streamed and on people's websites and on Facebook. I mean, this is some great, this is a golden age for jazz. information for sure. So, but we have to have the discipline to limit what we have coming in. So one way I can think of that I like to do is just limit myself to what I'm actually working on. So when I'm working on something, if it's, say, learning a solo or learning a tune or maybe doing an arrangement or a composition, I'll only listen to that one recording. I won't listen to anything else. I mean, maybe I'll have the news on or something at some point. But in terms of music, I kind of limit myself to just hearing that for a period.

And that's hard to do, but it's definitely possible. So like, even if you're, say, looking at one YouTube video, and that's what you're listening to, there's always that little thing on the side where it's like, you know, related video and stuff. So the tendency is to click over there. You just need to stay focused. So whatever you need to do, if that's to get an old school iPod and only load one song on and put yourself out on a desert island, then that's what you have to do. Most of those can kind of hit something between that and just sort of information overload.

But it's just limiting. And then what goes along with that is really knowing that if you learn something deeply, some jazz information, and we're really talking about music here normally, if you limit yourself but go deep. So you're not going wide at this time in terms of I'm going to try to learn 30 tunes this week. I'm going to say I'm going to learn one tune this week, but I'm going to go very deep with it. Listen to a lot of different versions. I know I just said listen to one, contradicting myself a little bit.

That's okay. You'll figure it out. You'll hear it. but really going deep with that one song, with that one solo, and then having the confidence to know that you, in going deep, you're really developing your ears, you're developing your vocabulary, developing all these elements, your sound, your personality that you need to be a great player. Yeah, and you can take that one step further with not just listening,

but sometimes we're practicing so much and we're trying to absorb so much that it just starts to block our brain. Everything's trying to fit through the small door, at least in my tiny brain. So I will just take one thing and only work on that for a week, just like you said, even if it's just like I'm getting out of jazz for a week and I'm just doing one technique thing on the piano that I should be working on anyway. But some kind of technical thing that I can spend a week doing and get my head out of jazz for a week and then I come back refreshed. Or maybe it's four-part writing in a choral style for a simple melody and just really trying to focus on my voice leading as opposed to, well, I've got to keep these. changes up this week or whatever. You know what I mean? Just take a break from it and work on something else.

You can work on something musical that's not, you know, jazz related. That'll still help you're playing. Yep. Another way that I think is useful to avoid too much jazz information is to only limit yourself to the highest quality jazz information. So that could be in the forms of recordings or critical writing about jazz, but if you limit yourself to just the highest quality, you know, you're not going to have as much coming in. So by that I would mean, you know, say with a recording, anything that's like super high quality in terms of like upper streaming level or LP or, I mean, I'm not like a crazy audio file, but I like to sit and really critically listening to music, or not even critically, just attentively listening to music without any distractions. And I want to hear it in the best

quality that I can be in. So that means sitting down and saying listening to one whole recording. Like, you know, one of my favorite records of all time is John Coltrane Crescent. And in this day and age, a lot of people listen to the individual tracks, what's fine. But if you tell yourself, okay, my listening for today is I'm going to sit down with, you know, a great pair of headphones or a great speaker system with my phone turned into airplane mode. And I'm going to listen to that record starting at the beginning, not starting at my favorite track or my favorite solo. Start at the beginning and listen to the end and just sit there. Okay, maybe you got a nice little glass of wine, little, little, little, little, little whiskey. Yeah, possibly. That's your only accoutrement, as the

French would say. But I mean, you know, you're really listening. I'm not talking about you have it on the background and you got some friends over it. That's fine too. Yeah. But that's not really listening. I mean, so when we talk about, you know, being overwhelmed with too much jazz information, I think if we get to that highest quality level, and I'm not saying that John Coltrane Cresman is the penultimate. It's pretty darn good, though, you know, but that could be, you know, but that could be, you know, that could be a current record that, you know, that could be a Robert Glaspers that you love now. I mean, there's so many great things. It could be Lewis Arms. I mean, it's not even about what it is. It's what you feel is really good quality. But then really

listen to it. Like, I mean, you're concentrating on that. Like you're at the gig. You know, like you're at the club hearing there. Because with these great listening environments, that's as close as we're going to get. So a lot of times we're listening in low quality, you know, like on a computer with bad speakers, on YouTube or whatever. And I mean, that's fun too. nothing wrong with that. But if you are feeling overwhelmed, go old school and just have the sound with you with a little bit of gin and juice too. I like that. I like that one a lot. Quality over quantity. Exactly. You're not going to eat McDonald's five times a day. You're going to have a really nice steak for dinner and call it. Yeah. Well, another thing you can

do is if you're feeling overwhelmed with jazz is to not listen to jazz for a little bit. Listen to other styles of music. You can still learn a lot and a lot can influence your jazz playing by picking up other styles of music. Try checking out some classical music you've been meaning to check out. It doesn't really matter. But just switch it up. It's always good to check out other styles. Absolutely.

And just remember, most importantly, you'll hear it. That's it for today's episode of the You'll Hear It Podcast. For more information or to hear more of these podcasts, go to openstudio network.com slash podcast.